In this episode of the Creating Wealth Show, host Jason Hartman and co‑host Michael Zuber discuss three main items: the surprising home purchase by self‑styled “crash bro” Nick Gurley, the current real‑estate market environment marked by widespread fear among buyers, sellers, and lenders, and upcoming educational events. They dissect Gurley’s claim of buying an Atlanta property $100,000 below its 2021 price, questioning the data and highlighting that Atlanta prices are generally higher now. The conversation shifts to mortgage rates, noting that higher rates (around 6‑8%) can actually benefit buy‑and‑hold investors by reducing competition and creating motivated sellers. Hartman explains the strategic advantage of income property: the ability to renegotiate financing, tenants, and improvements over time, unlike static assets such as stocks. They also critique “crash bros” who predict market collapses without accounting for central‑bank policy tools (rate changes, QE, reserve requirements) that can blunt downturns. The hosts compare income property’s historical performance and tax benefits to other asset classes, citing a 2008‑09 analysis where real‑estate outperformed global equities and precious metals. Finally, they promote two upcoming events – the Empowered Investor Live conference in Irvine, California (mid‑May) and a luxury super‑yacht mastermind in Croatia (June) – aimed at networking and education for investors. Throughout, the tone is conversational and enthusiastic, with a mix of skepticism toward crash predictions and confidence in leveraging current market fear.
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Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques, and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self-made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer, and entrepreneur whose own properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial independence day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.
All righty, folks, we're going to hit 3 topics. One, we are going to talk about a crash bro who is actually bought a home. Two, we are going to talk about the unique opportunity staring real estate investors in the face right now, and we're going to talk about a couple of events Jason has coming up. But folks, we've got to talk about Nick Gurley from Reventure Consulting. Jason, I don't know if you heard the news, but our boy bought a home.
Nick Gurley is a homeowner. Hey Mike, so I thought he said real estate prices were going to crash by 50%. Who knows? Maybe by 70%. Maybe they'll go down 100%. Yeah, he's buying a house. Good for him. Yeah.
So I want to read the quote again. Nick put this out on X. Just bought a property, $100K off of 2021 sale price, move-in ready. The market is crashing in certain areas. Mega deals if you know where to look and how to negotiate. I agree with his last point there.
And where do you think the property—
oh, I did some research and it appears it's Atlanta, Georgia.
Okay. So I really doubt Atlanta, Georgia is $100,000 off of the COVID-era prices. I mean, there's certainly no data to back that up, but yeah, I'm just— I'm going to—
I'm going to take the man at his word. Yeah. Saying he got $100K off, which—
well, I mean, I mean, that the number's like really fluffy. You know, I don't know what that means.
Yeah, we don't know if it's a million dollar home or a, you know, $300K.
We don't know the price of the home, so that, that percentage could vary. But the Atlanta market, by overall data, is higher than it was back then, not lower. Okay. Yeah, but here's the thing, every house at some point becomes a rehab project. Sure. Right. So who knows if he bought a property that was in great condition when it was sold in 2021, or who knows if it even sold then. Like, I don't know if that property— when he says $100 grand off, was there actually a sale?
That's what it says. I'm only going to take him at his word. $100K off the 2021 sale price.
Right.
Okay.
Okay. So if that actually sold and it transferred, maybe the property got thrashed or something right between then. I don't know. You know, maybe—
I don't think we need to split hairs. Give the guy his flowers. He bought a home, $100K off '21, move-in ready.
That's not an important gift.
Yeah, that's not important to me. The important line was actually how we closed it. Mega deals if you know where to look and how to negotiate. That is the message that I frankly agree with him. I agree that now is the time, especially with this fear of the war, right? There's this little window, we don't know how long it will be, where buyers are afraid, sellers are afraid, banks are afraid, everybody's afraid. And this is the time to—
you know what I'm afraid of? I'm afraid we might not get our rate cut.
Oh, we're not getting rate cut.
The rate cuts, I mean, wow, you know, Powell's latest, uh, vibe is, is not friendly for rate cuts, which, you know, have been expected. You know, look, the Fed is trying to weigh the overall economy, the employment or unemployment rate, along with inflation. And with energy price spikes, energy's in the cost of everything. Okay. And, you know, oil is way up, but I think that's going to be pretty temporary because they will open the Strait of Hormuz. Certainly that's going to happen. You know, I think those energy costs will come back down. But right now it is not looking good because there's some inflationary pressure with energy costs there for sure.
For sure. Yeah, I think a cut in 2026 isn't happening. And I'm on record at all. No, it's not happening. The next move's up, not down. Whoa.
Oh, you're killing me, man.
Yeah. Well, again, as an investor, I mean, I would love rates to be 8%, right? Let's just go back to 8%. Let's have all the buyers—
You're saying because you think it'll motivate sellers. Yeah, right.
Well, what I'm saying is because demand will crater and I love no competition and motivated sellers.
Yeah.
And 8% and higher mortgage rates give me both. No less demand, less competition, and more choices.
Yeah. 1% in rate is about 10% in purchase price. Okay. So 1%, 10%. That's the trade in either direction. It is a little bit rough. You know, it's not exact. Okay. So if we have rates, say they bump up by 1% or 100 basis points, okay, then we got to have a 10% reduction in price to be equal.
Okay. Or you just do less transactions.
Yeah. And as a buy and hold investor, that being my philosophy, and it is yours too.
No question.
You know, I like the lower rate better than the lower price. If the lower price would even happen, but—
Well, again, I, you know, there's lots of people been talking about, we had rates go up 400 basis points and prices are flat. So, you know, that, that certainly hasn't held. What happened is we had a transaction crash and that's really annoying to the crash bros like Nick Gurley, because You know, they've been wrong forever. But we're going to see if these rates, you know, because again, they're already up 50 basis points. I just did a cash-out refi at 5.99. I couldn't do that today. That's less than 2 weeks ago or 3 weeks ago. Now it's 6.5.
Yeah.
You know, again, as somebody who is a buy-and-hold guy, I would much rather do a deal at 8% than 5%. Why? Because I only write offers that cash flow day one. I only write offers that are great deals at 8%.
And you're, you're banking on the idea of refinancing later at some point.
Yes.
Yeah. And, and Michael, that's something we should discuss for a moment here. Okay. I've said this on my show many times over the years, but if you enter into a deal, okay, on anything in life, you know, could be real estate, could be anything else, and the other party starts changing the deal That's very bothersome, right? You know, we have a name for those people. We call them weasels. Yeah, retrade. Yeah, no, if they don't keep their word and stick with the deal they agreed to, you know, that's not good, right? But the great thing about income property or real estate in general, and I do distinguish between real estate and income property for obvious reasons. Hopefully those are obvious and I don't need to go into that right now. You know, we can renegotiate the deal forever. We can do that without being a weasel. What do I mean by that? You know, let's just bring that up for a minute. I mean, you can pay one price today, you can get one financing structure today, you can get one physical property with its certain characteristics and condition today, and you can change all of that later. Okay, you can get one type of tenant and one rental income today, and you can change that later. You can improve the property, you can refinance the property, you can change the deal indefinitely. The deal you agree to today is not the deal you are stuck with.
Yep.
But in anything else, you're pretty much stuck with that deal. If you buy Apple stock today, the price you paid is the deal you got. And if you sell it in 1 year or 5 years, it better be a higher price later than you pay today because you don't have these multi-dimensional characteristics and you don't have the characteristics of being able to renegotiate the deal all along the way. That's what the beauty— there are so many beautiful things about income property that just don't exist in other asset classes.
And that's, that's the key. Again, I want people to realize we're in a very unique opportunity. I've been doing this for 25 years and there's not many times where buyers and sellers are scared at the same time.
Yeah.
And right now, buyers and sellers are scared at the same time. And it's our job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's our job to take advantage of these moments.
Right.
And so, again, less competition, more motivated sellers.
I want everybody to think back to the beginning of COVID Okay. And I remember, you know, I had multiple search parameters set up, you know, on listing sites to feed me properties. And I just couldn't believe one property that I just missed. I mean, if the reporting was inaccurate, then okay, you know, but this property, I was looking for a personal residence and this property was listed for like $900,000 and something. It was in Tampa where I was kind of considering at the time, or it might've been St. Pete. I saw it come through on the listing site, $242,000. And I thought I must be misreading that.
Yeah, something happened wrong.
And I wasn't misreading it. I mean, unless they just reported like fake data or something, which really rarely happens. You know, that's very rare that they can even do that because they're using multiple data sources to pull that data in. But just remember, we all thought the world was ending. Okay.
No, motivated sellers will do stupid things.
Look, my business partner, Ken McElroy, he was publishing all kinds of doomer crash videos.
He called it 50% crash coming. I remember he had to take the video down.
He said real estate is over for this year, just write it off. And he said that probably in March, you know, so we had a lot of months to go of the year.
Yeah.
And what he admitted to me later, because he was obviously very wrong, okay, what he admitted later is he didn't appreciate the response of the government and the central bank. Remember, we are in a centrally planned economy, folks, and things do not happen in a vacuum. And this is why things are hard to predict. You cannot just take market forces like supply and demand and come up with a conclusion, because, you know, supply and demand, those are obviously the huge part of it, but the central bank can relax the money supply. They can ease the money supply. And remember, they have multiple tools for this, not just interest rates. Interest rates are a big one, but, you know, you can have reserve requirements and QE and all kinds of, you know, that— remember the twist and all these complex things. They can go into the mortgage market. They can buy up mortgage-backed securities. The Fed is the biggest investor on planet Earth. Okay.
And that's, that's where a lot of the doomers don't— they don't even hear themselves, right? They're talking about this crash, this, that, the other. And I'm like, guys, just, just play the next domino. Like, let's just say you're right for a second. What do you think the government does next? And they never think that far. And it's always the policy response, right? Do you really think the forces that be are going to let 2006 happen again, or '08, or '12, or whatever year you want to pick? The answer is no, of course not. It almost ruined the financial system.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So very, very cool. I love what you said, Michael, right there. That was a really good statement. Just play the next domino. Exactly right. Stop trying to predict this huge future, right? Just play the card you're dealt. Like Voltaire said, you know, we cannot choose the cards life deals us, but we must choose how to play those cards in order to win the game. And here's another thing the Crash Bros do. Is they constantly agonize about what real estate's going to do, as if that's in a vacuum. But what they don't say is, compared to what? Like, what else are you going to do? Okay, real estate might have its challenges from time to time, for sure. It's, you know, it's not perfect. Nothing is. But what else are you going to do? I mean, I remember I held a conference in 2008 or '09. I mean, we did multiple times a year, but I showed a chart that income property was actually the best performing asset class in the entire world during that time. I did a trailing 12 months analysis, and every stock market on earth had crashed, right? Okay, precious metals weren't doing very well, you know, because they don't give any yield, right? Right. Tax benefits. Income property won the game by comparison and it wasn't great. That was not a great— okay, but it was better than everything else, and there were cryptocurrencies back then.
So yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's really interesting to me. Again, we've got a crash bro, the king of crash bros, buying homes. We have this unique opportunity staring us in the face, and of course you've got a couple of events coming up that are really going to help people, you know, move forward. So tell us what couple events you got coming up.
Yeah, yeah. Well, one we've got none other than you, Michael Zuber, speaking at, and that's Empowered Investor Live, our annual conference. That's in Irvine, California. EmpoweredInvestorLive.com. Come and join us for that. You'll love it. Starts on Friday evening, goes all the way through Sunday at about 5, 6 PM, right near John Wayne Airport. So super easy, no need to rent a car. There's free shuttle, you know, hotels 5 minutes from there. It's super easy. And that's Empowered Investor Live, our conference. And then I've got my super Yacht Mastermind Group. And Dion, your friend in your community, is coming to this. Michael, I wish you were coming. I do these occasionally. This is, this is a business I created not to make money. I don't make money off of it. It's just to make memories. Yes, make memories, not money, right? Because I got other businesses for making money. And that's mastermindyachtadventures.com. I charter a 160-foot superyacht Wow, in beautiful Croatia. It's stunning. This is the second time I've done this in Croatia. We've got room for about 28 to 30 people, depends how the rooms configure. You know, it's a superyacht, it's a mastermind. We mastermind for about 2.5 hours a day, and then we just have fun the rest of the time. And people create lifelong friendships out of this. It's super luxury. There's a crew of 11 people. Everything is included on that yacht. High-speed Starlink internet, so you can do work. Yes, you can do work. All your meals, premium drinks, meals, gourmet everything. House cleaner to clean your room every day. It's a superyacht, you know, it's a, you know, multi-multi-million dollar superyacht. So it's incredible. Mastermindadventures.com for that one.
Jason, you're amazing, man. Looking forward to the event, uh, it's in May, right? The, uh, the one I'm looking at. Yeah, right around—
yeah, Empowered Investor Live, our conference, is in mid-May. And then the mastermind, yachtadventures.com, the mastermind is in June. So, uh, those are two great events for people.
Awesome, Jason. Take care of yourself. Have some fun.
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